Houses
by Evaseawynd
Summary: After the war ends, everyone must return home.


**4, Privet Drive**

_All characters belong to JK Rowling. Beta-reader needed – if anyone is interested, please leave a review !_

Even in her worst nightmares, she could never have imagined her house looking like _that_. The front yard wasn't so bad ; untidier than the neighbourhood norm, but still remotely acceptable. A concerned neighbour had probably mowed the lawn while they were gone. Her rose bushes were in dire need of attention, but that could easily be remedied. Some kids had painted a couple of graffiti on the outer walls – friends of her son, she supposed ; she knew what sort of company he kept, she wasn't that stupid – but the whole building needed a fresh coat of paint and the graffiti would go then.

Her main garden was in the backyard and, if she had wanted to reproduce a wild meadow, she couldn't have done it better. It would take her days to clean it up, and because the house needed her attention first, the garden would still have to wait a couple of weeks.

The house… Dust! Dust everywhere! In every corner, spread on every inch of furniture they owned! A thick layer of dust on the floor, filth on the walls, and it went on like that! She had been careless in their preparation to leave; or, rather, she had been weak. A good housewife listened to her husband, but Vernon had really acted ridiculously last summer and she would have to pay for his foolishness. It wasn't as if he would be the one making sure the house was habitable once again. She had known that Harry had been telling the truth ; she had known that they had to leave, just in case the Death Esters came their way after Harry's seventeenth birthday. If Vernon had come to his senses on time, she would have been able to cover the furniture, at least.

A plan to get the house, indeed! As if Harry wanted to live at Privet Drive for the rest of his life. As if a teenager cared for such things as houses and real estate ; Dudley certainly didn't and he didn't have to save the wizarding world from an evil overlord. Boys had other things on their mind at that age and, well…Poor Harry.

The first few weeks back at Privet Drive after a year of hiding were hectic, between Vernon frantically trying to regain control over his drill company and Petunia cleaning their house to the best of her abilities with Dudley's help, when he could spare the time – Harry had really been much better at this, but he wasn't there anymore. After a month, all that was left to clean in the house was Harry's room and the attic, which Petunia had never cleaned since her marriage, a little rebellion against Vernon's expectations of a wife.

For some reason, she waited until both Vernon and Dudley had left the house before entering Harry's bedroom with her cleaning gear. She stood for a moment in the doorway, not quite sure if she really wanted to do that – either enter or clean – but her common sense ushered her in. The bed was made in neat variation of a my-aunt-forced-me-to technique, all evidence of an owl had disappeared, the wardrobe door was ajar and a few books remained in the bookcase, all of them bound in a 19th century fashion. Petunia gathered that they were textbooks, as those were the only books one could expect a student to abandon.

Looking around the empty room, she felt a strange sense of loss. Instead of attacking the dust on the floor, she sat on the bed and tried to make sense of it. What had she lost? Her good-for-nothing nephew? What a loss. Vernon certainly didn't miss him. He was even positively gleeful at the thought of never seeing him again. To Vernon, Harry had never been anything else than a hindrance, a parasite he'd be better without. Why, he had even told Petunia once that taking care of Harry prevented her from wholly concentrating her attention on their son! No, really, Vernon would not miss the boy and was, in fact, very pleased by his departure.

Was _she _glad that he was gone? She certainly hadn't treated him correctly. She'd been weak, weak, weak. What kind of woman sent a baby in a cupboard because her husband was afraid he'd contaminate their own baby? It wasn't as if she hadn't known what magic was about. It wasn't a disease you could catch. Though, following that train of thought, it certainly wasn't something you could stomp out of a boy, and she had tried to do that. Why, though? Why couldn't Harry be like his mother and his father? Apart from the fact that Vernon hated magic, of course.

Leaning back against the wall, Petunia sighed. Almost seventeen years after taking Harry in wasn't really the time to admit that she had wanted the boy for herself and that that stupid, freakish magical world had stolen him from her. Harry would have been Petunia's little boy, as much as Dudley was Vernon's. A calm, quiet boy, who didn't go around bullying kids for fun – but Dudley had matured, thankfully. No, Harry would have helped her around the house, he would have brought home respectable friends and done something sensible of his time. There had been time, when Dudley was being too difficult, when Vernon was being too demanding, that she'd wanted to take Harry and leave. She'd have been a schoolteacher , a single mother with her little orphaned nephew. Her own little boy, so like her, with her father's eyes, that her dreadful sister had inherited.

If she'd taken Harry and left, maybe she would even have let him go to Hogwarts and bring all sorts of magic tricks home to show her, like Lily used to do for her parents. He would have written home, told her about his adventures at school – she knew about them anyway, thanks to the Deputy Headmistress undiscriminating practice of writing home about student mischief – but it would have been different. She would have known his friends and shared maternal stories with that horrible red-headed plump woman, or maybe with those dentists from London.

Standing up to take a small Quidditch poster off the opposite wall, Petunia finally admitted to herself that she did not mind magic per se, but she truly hated her sister. And she would have resented Lily even if she hadn't turned out to be a witch ; people like Lily left nothing to people like Petunia, people like Harry. They bullied and won their way. No wonder Lily had married James Potter instead of that other boy that used to live not far form their childhood home. Little Severus Snape did not fit Lily's perception of a perfect husband. He did not fit Petunia's either ; but he could have used to be loved by someone like Lily, as much as Petunia. But she was nothing to Lily, except a convenient means of being compared favourably to.

The books in the shelf were indeed textbooks. Petunia put them on the desk while she dusted and washed the bookcase and then took a moment to look at them. All Divination volumes had been left home ; it didn't take a genius to understand that Harry had loathed the subject. There was also a History textbook who looked rather interesting, if surprisingly unused. The other books were either about Astronomy or first or second level books. She had no use for spell-books, but she could not really throw them in the bin either. They would have to go in the attic. Flipping through the pages of the _Standard Book of Spells_, oddly fascinated by it, she briefly considered the possibility of returning them to Harry. But without an address, how could she?

Maybe he was staying with the Weasleys. Or, at least, the Weasleys would know where he was, and possibly even the Grangers. She had their number written somewhere. But she would have to admit to virtual strangers that her nephew care so little about her that he hadn't even left an indication of where he would live after the war.

Petunia supposed that he hadn't really expected to survive the war and, frankly, she had braced herself for his death, too. He wouldn't have been the first member of her family to die because of Voldemort ; the car crash excused had been used before to explain her parents' sudden death. Murdered because they had given birth to a witch. A Muggle-Born witch. An abomination, who had dared to marry a pureblood wizard. Not that her parents had meant their daughter to be magical, had they? It seemed stupid to make them pay for an unintentional feat, but then again, she hadn't meant to raise Harry and the Dursleys had gone into hiding. She supposed she should be grateful to be alive, having probably been more protected for being Harry Potter's aunt.

Life was unfair, thought Petunia, as she stated to scrub the floor. How many people like her had died, because they couldn't afford the protection she'd been given? Parents, siblings, people that their magical relatives loved more than Harry loved her. It wasn't as if she could have told the Death Eaters much about her nephew anyway.

Was that a loose floorboard? Well, that had better not be cake crumples. What had the boy thought, stashing cakes under the floor? Had he eaten _that_? Oh, boys will be boys, she supposed. There was a few pictures, too, mostly from school. They had probably fell out of whatever thing Harry had stored them in. She recognized the Gryffindor common room from the colours and the Weasley boy from the hair. There was a red-headed girl, too ; for heaven 'sake, did all the Potters have a thing for girls with red hair? She'd have to make sure that Harry got those pictures back.

She sighed again. Only the wardrobe was left and most of the clothes still in it would be thrown away. And in an alternate universe in which she would have raised the boy as her own and accepted magic willingly, she'd certainly have trashed him for leaving potions ingredients rotting at the bottom of the wardrobe. She didn't even want to know what those things were ; she'd been disgusted enough by Lily's descriptions so long ago.

Books and pictures. The spare bits of parchment found under the loose floorboard could go in the bin ; no one would ask questions about those. Petunia didn't exactly relish the thought of going up in the attic, but Vernon would not take kindly to spell-books lying around, even in a room he didn't use.

Rebellion or not, a good clean-up was necessary. Petunia had apparently miscalculated the number of things that she had accumulated over the years. Where had that rocking chair come from? Oh, yes, she'd taken a few things out her parents' house when they had died. All the family memorabilia was probably sitting in Petunia's attic right now.

Would that include Lily's school things? Had her sister left much at their parents'? She made her way to where a dozen boxes were piled. There was indeed two with 'Lily – School' marked on it. She opened one and saw books; even more than Harry had left. What was she going to do with all those magic books? She didn't mind keeping a few of Harry's, but added to Lily's, it was really too many. What was in the other box? Pictures, letters and, oh, _yes_, that letter, too. _Dear Ms Evans_… Lily's letter had been thicker than Harry's, as the Evanses had needed more explanation than Petunia. There was a leaflet explaining the Statute of Secrecy and basic laws concerning Muggles, indications about how to get to Diagon Alley and to the Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, a school list and a couple of other things. She had gone to Diagon Alley with her mother and her sister and remembered it as a grand commercial artery. Lily had run everywhere, staring at every window display, while her Mother had looked into the second-hand shops – she had loved collecting old things.

Second-hand shops!

That was a completely ridiculous idea. If Vernon ever learned that she had briefly considered going _there _, he would… But then, they would be stuck with a load of spell-books, and that was worse than a day trip to London. And they could make a bit of money out of it. Wizard money, but they had banks that could change it like civilized people, didn't they?

That year in hiding had changed her more than she thought. Never before she would have considered an excursion into the wizarding world for something as menial as selling books to a second-hand shop. Or maybe it was losing Harry. Ever since Lily's eleventh birthday, magic had been part of her life. And now, all that was left of it were a few books stored in the attic.

Petunia had never really been part of that world, though, and it was best for her to get rid of all remnants of it. Best to put all that behind her and pretend it never happened; she didn't have a sister, she didn't have a nephew, she certainly never wished that the boy had been hers instead of Lily's. She would only acknowledge the wizarding world one last time, getting rid of all that their belongings, Lily's and Harry's, and she would go on with her life, a perfectly, orderly, _Muggle_ life.

Vernon was less stupid than she had imagined him to be – what a horrible thing to think about one's husband, but Petunia wasn't one for romance and preferred things to be stated as they were – and he eyed her suspiciously when she announced that she needed to go to London. Thankfully, he had bought Dudley a car as a late birthday present, and therefore had no good reason to refuse the use of the other car to her. She lied about the boxes and pretended they were for Oxfam and wasn't it just outrageous to only open an office in London? No, really, he didn't want to accompany her there, she would shop a bit afterwards, he'd better stay and teach Dudley how to drive.

She parked on the street she knew the _Leaky Cauldron _was on and stood with her boxes around where she thought the door was until a wizard went out, indicating the pub entrance. An odd-looking woman asked her why she didn't use her wand to levitate her boxes and Petunia found herself babbling something about it being taken away during the war, something she'd heard an Auror refer to in one of their too few checks on her safety. Then, she got pitying looks and a helping hand to Diagon Alley's biggest second-hand shop.

It was nothing like the first time she had set foot in the magical word. Some shops were still boarded up, posters were hanging in the windows sporting pictures of wanted Death Eaters, there was still an air of wariness floating around…Some rebuilding was going on – what on Earth had happened to the bank ?

'That's Harry Potter, didn't you know, ma'am ? Flew out of Gringotts with the dragon!', said the owner of the second-hand shop.

Petunia could only stare at him. What could a woman say to a man who was telling her that her nephew had ridden a dragon? She almost asked why there was a dragon inside the bank and how Harry had come near it in the first place, but she didn't want to look too foreign in such an odd setting as a wizard second-hand shop and, frankly, she wasn't sure she really wanted to know. Her nephew had risked his life too often for her taste. She might not have been much of a mother to him, but she did worry about him and hearing about dragons and murderers and basilisks…

'Ma'am?' The shopkeeper broke her reverie.

'I am sorry; what were you saying?'

It was about the books; what an excellent condition they were in and how he could give her a few galleons for it and…

'Did they belong to Harry Potter? How did you come by them?'

Petunia was forced to explain - as briefly as she could manage – that Harry Potter was her nephew and that he had left books with her; teenagers you know…

'It is an honour to meet you, ma'am !'

She was glad to leave the shop. The last thing she needed was a bunch of people shaking her hands and telling her how wonderful her nephew was and, my, what an honour it was to meet her! Freaks, all of them. As if you assaulted a poor, innocent woman like her ! Especially to tell her how heroic her little nephew had been!

She knew that all right, without their help.

Back in Privet Drive, she took the pictures she had found under the floor and put them in the same box as Lily's pictures and letters. The box would stay hidden in a corner in the attic and Petunia would never have to acknowledge the wizarding world ever again.

But a part of her would always miss the little boy that could have been hers but who was theirs.

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